Therese and vocation

"Nearly ecstatic with the supreme joy in my soul, I proclaimed: O Jesus, my love, at last I have found my calling: my call in love."

So wrote St. Therese about her discovery of her place in the heart of the Church. She points out that being in the heart of the Church means that all the other members are counting on her for life. This is why a nun who never left the cloister from the age of 16 until her death at 24 is now the Patroness of missionaries.

Remarkable about the above passage, too, is the idea that her 'calling' was not merely to be a Carmelite. Most of us religious today would think that we had found our calling once we had made it into the cloister. St. Therese sees that each of us is created for a unique purpose that only we can fulfill in God's plan. Are we searching for that? Do we really believe in it, or do we secretly harbor the opinion that God has more pressing things to do than to call me? The God who knows us before we are even conceived, of course, never views our salvation as unimportant.